Hello, For me it was not a matter of Debian at all in the beginning. I just wanted to use anything smelling GNU in it... actually Red Hat would do. This was the time when I bought my 1st PC. So I just decided to do a search on Google, 'best gnu/linux distro' or something similar, and Debian was all over the place more than anything else -- this was mid 2004. I have heard of it before because I noticed the dull logo on the website -- yeah, and that logo is ugly but what it represents is truly legendary. I got hold of the 7CDs for 'woody' from some guy here in South Africa who sold them for a little above R100 (about $16)... And there I was with a frustrating install with a non-straightforward 'cfdisk' I was presented with to create partitions. Did I mention that it was only weeks later that I managed to get X running and that with a standard a somewhat universal vesa driver (not too sure) at 16-bit color. I never managed to get sound working and tha I tried so hard in vain. I nevertheless honor these moments because they made sure that I learned some really useful command-line utilities which are ever so useful. Then came along along SUSE which was perhaps released in mid-2004 which I only used because it had a more modern GUI but had a really sluggish package manager. I couldn't wait for the release of 'sarge' which dragged on forever. Luckily Ubuntu 4.10 came and rescued me from SUSE, which I soon chucked away... Its ease-of-use was off-set only by its lack of grand repositories that 'woody' spoiled me with... Then there I had access to broadband and I switched back to Debian... And I LOVE it. The runner-up is Ubuntu of course, and the lack of Gnome 2.12 in Debian tempts me to make another switch. But I know the Debian culture will keep me coming back for more... I find it amazing that Ubuntu managed to capture the love of so many GNU/Linux lovers/users so quickly and the possibility that the numbers are bigger than that of Debian. I, on the other hand, am entrenched in 'the greatest OS on earth'. Thanks for reading this personal account... if you did.
